Negril Jamacia, south end of the 7 mile beach, north end had the nice hotels.
I came out to Philly for a job interview at a new school. The college I was interviewing with didn’t pay for accommodations, so as a starving assistant professor I booked at the no-star Philly airport Motel 6.
For starters, the room was filthy and the bedding had obviously been renting out at an hourly rate. I was afraid to take my shoes off, much less sit down anywhere.
For lasters, the inner-motel-lock-thingy had been torn out of the frame and the doorknob didn’t lock.
When I asked for a new room the clerk said “oh, yeah, that’s the room the police shot that guy in last week – they kicked the door in and we haven’t fixed the locks yet.”
I had to prop my eyelids open with truckstop toothpicks for the looong drive back to Ohio that night, but it was far safer than staying at the Motel Murder 6 :eek:
Filbert, that’s extremely creepy.
I can’t help thinking that a “mass of dodgy-looking wires sticking out of the wall” would be a clever way to conceal a surveillance camera. :eek:
Possibly the motel outside a base I was transferring to. The sign on the back of the door said “Prostitution Prohibited!”. It was downhill from there.
Sorry, I got whooshed by a phony “empirenews” story.
There have been cases of bodies decomposing under hotel/motel beds for days/weeks, but apparently no documented cases of any discovered several years later.
That’s like the health club my girlfriend joined. They have a sauna. Inside it, there’s a sign: “SEXUAL ACTIVITY IN THE SAUNA IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED”.
When I was a teenager I was in a band, and our lives were kind of hectic for a while, so we decided to take a random midnight adventure to the ocean. We ended up in Westport, Washington State, and it was cold and rainy out so we didn’t want to sleep in the van. We figured out how much money we had and looked for the cheapest motel we could find. I don’t even remember the name of it, but it lived up to our expectations.
It was really shady and thankfully we brought our guitars in the motel room with us, because the next morning the lead guitarist found that the van had been rifled through. The place smelled of mold, the walls were dirty and moist(The door handles were moist, too, which I remember grossed me out), and we didn’t trust using the sheets that were on the bed; we ended up sleeping on a blanket on the floor. The lights flickered and the pipes creaked whenever we used water.
But let me tell you - we wrote some damn good music that night. It ended up being a really good memory! 
ooh, I forgot about the motel in nowhere Ohio. Seriously nowhere. The nearest town was about 10 minutes away. The hotel charged a measly $21 bucks at at time when I could expect the Motel 6 to be charging $59. A friend had found it while on a desperate search for a room during a big event in Mansfield. So, the next year when the event rolled around, a bunch of us stayed there rather than camp. I had thrown my sleeping bag in the car and am glad I did.
The motel was between the trailer park and the strip joint. Uh huh. The beds had heavy sheets on them, no blankets. The room had a 40-watt bulb in it and another in the scary, moldy bathroom. The bathroom window was warped open. The door light was on 24-7 and showed through the curtains. My roommate and I took to unscrewing it each night so we didn’t have to deal with the bright yellow light. I gave her my sheet so she would have something almost blanket-like, while I used the sleeping bag.
We were there for a week. We never had any trouble with the locals and we got clean towels every other day. The bugs remained in the bathroom. We picked up a can of Lysol for the shower and left it behind for the next folks. Worth every penny we spent on it but not a penny more.
I always say that I will stay pretty much anywhere except the Bates Motel, the Roach Motel, and the Zanzibar Motel (“Special Day Rates”).
And I never have.
(So far.)
We stayed at a motel beside I75 in Dayton, OH one year. It was a little rectangular 2-story building with probably 20 rooms in it. It was in a parking lot with an out-of-business restaurant and gas station, looks like it used to be a truck stop. Anyway the motel looked like it had little or no maintenance, the room was worn and dirty. The door didn’t close properly and you could see daylight around the door frame. When you laid down on the bed you could also see a pretty big gap of daylight under the AC unit. I seem to remember we got in late and there was a convention in town so we didn’t have many other choices on where to stay, so we stuck it out.
That motel was torn down a year or two later.
I remember one that could have turned bad. My sister and I were driving thru Texas hill country, heading to Austin, late at nite when tornado warnings for the area we were driving thru came on the radio. Shit. We stopped at the first motel we saw. It was probably 10p or so. Little family owned joint. Note on the door said late arrivals ring bell, so we did. Woman in her nightclothes came and said they were full up except for the truckers’ dorm. And at that point no one was in the dorm, but if someone came, they’d let them bunk there with us. Cheap as hell, so we took it. Just a big room full of singles, no matching bedding to be sure, and 1 bathroom. Turned out fine tho, no truckers joined us.
Come to think of it, had there been a tornado, I doubt that place would have saved us.
Not could not - DID NOT. Like I said, never regretted my decision. My only regret is that I signed up for that in the first place.
My decision not to go was after what could best be described as a bullying incident AT A CONCERT, WITH THE PERPETRATOR’S PARENTS IN THE AUDIENCE, and because all my other friends in the band had already dropped out of going in part because of similar behavior from her and other kids, I knew that was what I was going to be dealing with if I went. 
The girl who did this was not banned from going, but she had been named drum majorette for the next year and was told that she would not be doing that. I really think she should have been kicked out, and not gotten a refund either. Oh, well, that was 35 years ago.
There were multiple incidents of kids getting drunk, doing drugs (which nowadays would, in most places, get kids sent home COD) and most of the parents acted even worse than the kids.
p.s. This girl was not well-liked by most other kids, but they put up with her because she had older siblings who bought booze for her. I recently saw her on my Facebook feed, and immediately blocked her.
Our lodging of choice in Mexican Hat is the San Juan Inn. Nice enough spot. Unfortunately one night we were passing through and it was full so we had to stay in one of the other two or three places in town. We ended up in a place with a door that seemed like a hollow interior door to an old house. Complete with about an inch and a half space between the floor and bottom of the door so critters could come and go as they pleased. We ate at this place up the road where the gimmick was they would grill steaks on a grill that would swing over the coals. I don’t know what that accomplished besides taking three times as long to cook our steaks. I guess it looked sufficiently “western” for the foreigners who were most of the clientele.
One night in Motel Hell was in a Days Inn in Wurzboro, NY. Our neighbors must have been taping a sex video because it went on all night, loudly, and it wasn’t just two people. Plus our toilet was broken. Whee.
A kind of bummer was when Marriott pulled out of the Hotel in downtown Trenton we used to stay at while visiting my mother in law. It used to be sort of a treat staying there. I think the city took it over and replaced the deluxe queen size mattresses with smaller ones that didn’t even fit on the frames. My wife and I were practically elbowing each other for room. Everything about it was taken down a few notches. It looks like Wyndham recently took it over so maybe things are looking up.